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The graphics are, of course, improved and I quite likeCiv4 engine (I have al the Civ4 and add-ons and all and love it), but this doesn't work!
There are parts to the original game which are missing here, like - Independence declaration upgrading the rebel troops when they fight in the woods and wilds. Troops lose their horses when first defeated, then their rifles and then their lives when attacked, and can repair/heal by using stockpiled horses and weapons. There's a chance that the Royal powers of another European nation sending troops to assist.

In this newest version there are some mad things and maddening too - The training regimes take FAR too long and the pricing of recruiting and training is weird. My English privateer failed repeatedly and every time to beat a Dutch Merhantman, despite that the 'ratio' is 5:4 to my privateer, and even the mouse pop-up says it's a 75% chance for me to win!! What's the point?

I like it, for many reasons, and it's very playable, but it's not very cleverly created and leaves too much to be desired (what's that ferkin music too? AAarrrgghhhhhh...) I turned off the annoying music and half the sounds also vanished!

The king is UNBEATABLE when attacking your cities, his men get huge attack bonuses for attacking settlments:50% for regular or dragoon and 150% for artillery.
Your only hope is to fight in forests or mountains where you can get defensive bonuses, since the king's men don't get bonuses from terrain.

A little tactic I find useful is to establish a few missions and then take "chief powhatan" as a founding father, he will give all your converted natives +50% to their attack strength, making them equal to a soldier without wasting any gun!
If you like, you can choose "freedom of arms" when declaring independence, which gives 1 extra battle strength to all colonist units- 2(starting strength)+1(freedom of arms)+50%(chief powhatan)=4.5 combat strength for converted natives!!!

New strategy: produce liberty bells like crazy since you found your first colony. Get you rebel sentiment as high as posible before revolting, so your units will get rebel sentiment bonus in combat. Even if you have to face an overall strike force of 300 soldiers, 150 dragoons, 100 artilleries and 40 MoW, they will come up in waves of 10 or 20 at a time, your units will be stronger, and you will wipe them out like flies.

Rebel sentiment bonus in combat is your overall rebel sentiment minus 50%. So if it is around 90% you will get a combat bonus of 40% (Simon Bolivar doubles this effect so you will get 80%!!!).

This is how it works:

- Build just one coastal city close to Europe, with at least one forest plot, if you have fish better. There you will produce lots of food with fishermen, and build warehouses and college/university asap. Your other cities should all be inland, and each will be specialized in one industry (coats, cigars, cloth and Rum). For example, a cigar city must have at least two grassland plots for tobacco and forest plot. The same for other industries. Build factories in all of them with 2 or 3 specialists each. You will also need a Gun production city, so look out for a location where you have 3 hills and 2 forests plots. There you will build ironworks and arsenal. With 3 blackmiths and 3 gunsmiths, some founding fathers and high rebel sentiment, you can produce up to 100 guns a turn!
- It is important to produce lots of food in all your settlements so buy or train in indian villages lots of farmers (don't train them in your schools because graduation time grows exponentially with each new graduate). Soon you will be pumping out lots of colonists. I even found cities only for food and horse production. It is important to be able to bring new reinforcements each turn, while the king can't.
- Each time you found a new city, put at least one colonist to produce bells to increase rebel sentiment. Upgrade to statesmen later. That way you will get most of founding fathers. Use your university only statemen training. You will need 3 per city.
- Before revolution produce military points to get founding fathers that give free upgrades (+1 dragoon movement, formation, ranger, veteran I). Buy as many veteran soldiers as you can (ask the king for protection, he will sell them for cheap). They are worth it because they get XPs faster than militia units. Buy lots of horses. You should have at least 20 dragoons and 6 soldiers. That should be enough even you have to face overwhelming numbers.
- When you declare independence, put 6 to 8 soldiers in your coastal city. This will prevent the king from attacking from ships. When they land attack with your dragoons restlessly. They will almost every combat. Heal them in closest inland city. It is useful to have a unit with surgeon upgrade fortified in this city. Keep this up and you will defeat them easily.

Don't allow the king to capture any of your cities as it will drop your sentiment down.

Guys alothough people pretty much have said the starts you have ti remeber back to hisory class almost none of the time in the american revolution did USA win the battle, when we took back boston from the brittish we put cannons on the hills and.. hey sounds like one of the starts doest it not? also most battles america won was on the offencive sid put in a way real facts you could say when your rebelling. when i first got the game i played as samuel de shamplainm of the french i lost due to time but im doing ok in my current play.

I understand that it's possible to win, and thank you guys for sharing these strategies. Most of it is pretty basic (Attack his ships with his units still in them) although some of it is pretty ingenuitive (abandoning the cities to avoid artillery bonuses). Overall though, I find this game far too hard. What's the point of having an easy mode when you're still gonna have the piss beaten out of you. They really screwed up on this one. It needs to be nerfed bad.

my tactic is the 0 rebel policy till freedom fight. my advice is make 1 town for tool production, another for weapon production and one more for food(colonists) production. once your ready to fight get 9 aldermen (3 for each town) and have all the standard building that give you rebel sentiment like the newspaper etc. once you have all the needed building set your production queues to military output for all three towns and your aldermen will produce the political output while your rebel sentiment increases you will get the chances to recruit leaders(get the leaders that increase your troops skills like formations, veteran etc)
i beat the kings army of 53 infantry, 31 cavalry, and 22 cannons with 30 infantry, 0 cavalry, 10 cannons. the trick with the fighting is arm everyone that can carry a weapon and put them in a forest sqaure that is right next to your town(s)(your town must have no defenses) so that when the enemy army enters your town make sure he gets no civilians but the 1 that had to stay and then when he enters attack his army in the towns with your cannons and you will see his troops fall apart, and if he attack you then your lucky cause your in the forest and you got 55-75% protection so you will win by defending then when its your turn you will have the chance to promote/upgrade a few which improves skills and health.

the troops you should have in the forest square is at least 10 infantry and 10 cannons the infantry will protect your cannons when enemy attacks.

never leave troops in your towns no matter how high the defense is they will lose.

I defeat the king quite easily and here's how. Build as many Ship's of the Line as possible and block off every square of ocean. When the king's ships get close sink every one with his army on-board. When he runs out of ships he will surrender. I have never lost a single city to the king's men. If he does manage to land an army attack his "landing party" until every one is killed. Good luck and remember "Freedom is not free", vote McCain-Palin!

easy win colonization. defeated king on pretty high level.
keep your gold pile low. at all times. buy at least 2 preferebly 3 galleons to keep it low. start piling up the resources. shipout ground products if you need some cash. this will ensure the tax increase affacts those items. so you can refuse the increase of the tax. refuse on all except for the goods you're pilling up to sell for hefty profits. pile up using wagontrains!

once you have enough for like 6 shipments of filled galleons (so 1800 products start selling and buying elderly statemen instead (or train alot before hand). at this time your rebel sentiment should be 0%.
If you can, try getting the 25% reducting of bought units congressmen!
now start increasing it with at least 2 elderlystatesmen in every city and a printing press. and make sure all your units are in the city etc.
and start building ship of the line in all your city's with shipyards.

when you get around 30% start shipping the goods to europe.
when you're over 50% make sure the last batch has arrived in europe.
sell everything. NOW buy alot of ship of the line. this is important. with the remaining money (should be about 7K since those ships are expensive buy troops to fill up the galleons.) (that's why 3 galleons is better)
launch them all to America. Declare independance. you're troops will arive bofore the kings troops. so you'll have plenty of time.

now all you have to do is sink his ships. for every man-o-war you attack, make sure you have a back-up ship of the line to sink it.
win ratio is better than 2:1
in most cases the king will have between 3 to 6 ships. so if you have 12 ships of the line, it's an auto-win. sink his ships and chose the withdraw upgrade. repair you're dameged ships in city's.

move you're galleons to deploy the troops where he lands. (make sure he can't sink your galleons with troops on board!!) kill troops. king retreats to get more troops. repeat.

if you sink all his ships and he has 800000000000 soldiers left in Europe. you still win. so the key is naval suppiriority

Colinization is a econimic game... so it really depends on which country you choose. Do you want to jumpstart ahead with the Dutch in the early game? (That Merchantman is pretty good at the beginning where you are rescourceless.) Or do you want to have a developed land that has great indutrial value? (That hardy pioneer sure comes in handy!) Do you want to beat up the natives for treasure? (Arrgh! Conquistedors!) And the last option, do you want to have high rebel values?

Problem is, most people don't focus on the beginning. You need to choose where your attributes are going to work best, like the French building where silver is so they can build a mine and then you put an expert silver miner there and bam! You have instant money. Really don't just flaunt with that beginning. It's too important.

Take the Fight to Them
The King's army is fresh off the boat and unfamiliar with the terrain of the New World. To represent this, they receive no defensive bonus when crossing mountains, forests or other types of terrain. This means it's often advantageous to attack them as they approach a settlement, rather than allowing them to attack you.

Using the Land to Your Advantage
The units of the Royal Expeditionary Force only receive combat bonuses when attacking your cities. They do not get any bonuses based on the local terrain. This means attacking the King's forces as they march through mountain passes will likely yield better results than simply waiting for them to lay siege to your city.

I manage to beat the king in my second game by using the "0 bell" strategy (plus a bit a luck). The king still had a strong land force but with only 8 Man O War ships. I managed to wipe them all out (with privatee and SOLs), so that I won the war (i.e. the land force no longer able to arrive, although the king still have around 100~150 land units...... who the hell design this game???). In order to dispose my "extra" military force, I even declared war on another king (i.e. while another foreign colony is having war with his king), it was awesome.

However, I try not to use the "0 bell" strategy in my 3th game, and I failed..... This game really need a patch, as it is pointless to play a game which can only be won by a stupid strategy......

AMEN! Preach it brother. I was wondering why had never heard of this game - being a diehard CIV fan. Agree with comment someone said - how could Sid put his name of this?!? Kid need college money? It's an exercise in futility.

How can Sid put his name to this piece of cr*p?! I've been such a Civ fan from v1-4, but never tried Col, until now - I feel cheated and I want a refund.

I had played a few games and been roundly defeated by the King each time, so decided to search online for some basic tactics to further develop my own strategies. What I didn't expect to find was a way to cheat the system to win - which appears to be about the only way you have a hope of winning - does it give anyone satisfaction to beat the game like that?

I want to build an empire to be proud of, but this idea of sacrificing cities in order to take advantage of the relative attack/defence bonuses just doesn't sit well with me. Maybe this is the wrong game for me......perhaps I should just stick to Civ.

But....How can a strategy based game have so little strategy involved? Or should I say - 1 surefire winning strategy (0 bells) which is wholly unrealistic to the idea of this simulation and far from enjoyable to play through. Ok, so other strategies have been suggested - build only ships; occupy every marine square; etc, etc. Hmm does that sound exciting?

It doesn't feel like I'm using my brain to outwit anyone, rather just following a linear experience of doing this, then this, then this....Victory, ahem.

This truly is Civ IV's ghetto cousin! How can it get some reviews of 90%????? Monkeys!

i found one way to defeat the king. Build LOTS and LOTS of ship of the line i mean REALLY LOTS. save, declare independance. see where the kings ships pop up. load. position your ships there. declare independance and try to whipe the ships out before they reach land. Somethimes a ship will get trough. so scramble almost ALL your forces to that point as well so you can try to defeat the landing forces. it worked for me untill i ran out of ships. .
But i still think it is the only way. cause the ships will come in with 6 at a time but the troops with aroud 40 at a time.

What also helps is make a naval blokkade around the land so the kings forces can't land the first time. Or they have to attack you, but you will have the 10% defence bonus.

I finished the game even in revolutionary.. there is only a few hints.. ...do not produce any bells untill it is time to rebel.. build in every town newspapers and printing presses and do not produce any soldier untill then .. only stock rifles and horses in wagon trains.. keep your population mostly 30 and have only three colonies.. when you decide to rebel.. place your all elderstatesmens for bells.. IT IS HEL IMPORTANT TO NOT PRODUCE BELLS UNTILL YOU HAVE 3 ELDERSTATESMEN IN EVERY TOWN AND ALL TOWNS HAVE PRINTING PRESS AND NEWS PAPER AND ONLY HAVING LESS THAN 30 PEOPLE INCLUDING YOUR EVERYMAN IN THE MAP AND NOT PRODUCE ANY SOLDIER UNTILL YOU PRESS ON START REVVOLUTION BUTTON.. with this method you will be able to revolt in 5 or 6 turns after starting producing bells.. and king will have added mostly 2-3 soldiers 1-2 dragons 1-2 artilary and maybe a man o war...then after pressing on start revolition make your all people deragons with rifles and horses in you stocked stocks or in wagon trains.. you will have at least 27 dragons ass king will have 10-12 soldiers 5-6 dragons.. and 5-6 artileries..if you do not wait in fortesses and fight on open areas your dragoons will surely destroy their soldiers and artilleries.. only problem is kings dragoons.. you will mostly need 2 dragoons against 1 kings dragoons.. but you will easily win because they will come in waves and youır wounded dragoons will heal until the next wave comes..

surefire way to increase rebel sentiment is to have a soldier or ten in the regiment of each city. even if you're producing bells like crazy your people won't want to revolt if they don't have protection from the most badazz infantry units ever...purple and brown?? come on people!

the more soldiers you have the larger the kings army will get. to keep it low you only need a soldier in each city. your scouts also count as soldiers. start early getting a statesman build a school and educate more statesman. as your population grows you will need them. build printing press and newspapers as soon as you can this will draw more founding fathers and much faster and earlier in the game. when its time buy your soldiers, they increase in price progessively 1500,1800,2100, ect.ect: need at least 5 then make dragoons out the wing wang. to help store weapons and horses aboard the wagons and ships. untill needed so you can have more than allowed by warehouses.

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